they're always interesting as text no, pop tunes. the ones that are suddenly resonating with millions of people. i mean they're interesting to think about. why these particular words and sentiments are doing something to people en masse - having an affect en masse. they're a diagnostic approach for thinking about what our cultures are like at any given time. i think they do change how people actually think and act as well. behaviours are legitimated by pop choons. sometimes they circulate concepts. produce neologisms.
No, not really. The thing is culture isn't interesting once you understand how it works. It is like a sieve. It isn't so much salt of the earth and neither it is a conspiracy beamed from down on high, but its secret lies in mean averages and the consensus of the population that reproduces its daily conditions of living. The ultimate culture is the middlebrow, in that sense. Art has the potential to do more than culture precisely because it can anticipate, although I will grant this is exceedingly rare in todays art scenes.
In that sense, there are many institutions around the labour party (for instance) which produce a cultural condition of conformity. You can have grievances and be dissatisfied, but your problems are remediable etc. Mark's fascination with pop culture was an extension of his labourism. That somehow the overproduced (and this is not a moral judgment) swill of our present condition can tell us anything other than moving bums on seats. He couldn't truly understand that capitalism -produces disasters and political crises almost as fast as it produces commodities. This is the stuff by which professional commentators live, granted, but the scripts generally remain the same, and the players are altered in ostensibly bewildering configurations.
pop music moves on fast too. i was on a plane yesterday listening to the top uk songs of 2009 and they sound a million years old. beamed in from another planet. pop and rap are the two things where the audience/artist feedback loop feels particularly fast. no fucking around. coz they thrive on novelty
I don't agree that rap (understood as a historical tradition) thrives on novelty. Possibly after lil wayne this is the case but not before. If anything You seem to be making the case for 2017 era Migos here!
As for pop, yes, so much of it does not endure. Novelty is not an implicit good. Dance music has the same problem, but instead of oversaturation through novelty it's oversaturation through pure content.
don't you think those choons sound new? as distinct from good. production-wise i think all this stuff sounds kind of new. it sounds like AI. they sound so insta informed as well lyrically. girls trying to understand themselves. can you not hear the sex and gender politics shifting in them compared to tunes from ten years ago
Compared to the pop music of 2009, I think they sound positively antediluvian!
The thing is old habits die hard and you didn't heed
@blissblogger 's advice to stop treating music as surrogate literature. Treat it as collective mnemonics.
